On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 482]

|482| necessity of war is posited for the shape and individuality of the ethical totality, which – because in it there is the free possibility that not only individual determinacies but the completeness of them as life is annihilated, and indeed for the absolute itself or for the people – preserves the ethical health of the peoples in their indifference to the determinacies and to their becoming habituated and fixed, just as the movement of the winds preserves the lakes from the putrefaction into which a lasting calm would put them, as a lasting or even perpetual peace would put the peoples.

With the negative of infinity just considered – because the shape of the ethical totality and its individuality are determined as an individuality directed outwards, and the movement of this as bravery – the other side is immediately connected, namely the subsistence of the opposition. The one is infinity, negative, as is the other; the first is the negation of the negation, the opposition against the opposition, the second the negation and opposition itself in its subsistence as determinacies or manifold reality. These realities in their pure inner formlessness and simplicity, or the feelings, are in the practical sphere feelings reconstituting themselves out of difference and passing through, out of the sublatedness of the differenceless self-feeling, an annihilation of intuitions, and restoring themselves – physical needs and enjoyments which, posited again for themselves in totality, obey, in their infinite entanglements, one necessity and form the system of universal reciprocal dependence with regard to physical needs and to labour and accumulation for them and – this as a science – the system of so-called political economy. Since this system of reality is wholly in negativity and in infinity, it follows for its relation to the positive totality,

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    Cross-reference

    Cross-reference:
    The following passages of this essay anticipate ideas that Hegel later developed at greater length in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Each link leads directly to the exact passage within this essay:

    p. 427 f. (part 2, 1802) – “The state of nature, and the majesty and divinity of the whole of the condition of right …” → § 258 (on the relation between the state of nature, contract theory, and the state’s ethical substantiality)
    p. 437 (part 2, 1802) – “If the determinacy of property in general is posited, then the tautological proposition …” → § 135 (on the critique of the empty formalism of the Kantian doctrine of duty (the example of property))
    p. 439 (part 2, 1802) – “A maxim that, on this principle, is immoral because it contradicts itself, is, precisely …” → § 135 (on the critique of the empty formalism of the Kantian doctrine of duty (the example of helping the poor))
    p. 449 (part 2, 1802) – “In this its determination, then, punishment is something in itself, truly infinite and …” → § 99 (on the theory of punishment: punishment as a work of freedom, against the mere idea of coercion or deterrence)
    p. 458 (part 2, 1802) – “They received laws and commanders from the will of their monarch, and the descendants of …” → § 357 (on the Roman Empire as the disintegration of ethical life into private personhood and abstract universality)
    p. 459 (part 2, 1802) – “It is this nothing other than the performance of tragedy within the ethical, which the …” → § 324 (on the ethical moment of sacrifice and the transience of the finite (compare the motif of war))
    p. 464 (part 2, 1802) – “But that which we have set on one side under the outer form of the first estate is the …” → § 325 (on the estate of valor of its own, and the free, violent death as the highest abstraction of freedom)
    p. 469 (part 3, 1803) – “There must also be a reflex of the same in his empirical consciousness, and such a reflex …” → § 204 (on the second estate (possession, property, bourgeois/formal ethical life))
    p. 469 f. (part 3, 1803) – “Those properties, however, that are truly ethical, in that in them the particular or …” → § 150 (on virtue as ethical energy become individual (the examples of Epaminondas, Hannibal, Caesar))
    p. 470 (part 3, 1803) – “It must also present itself in the form of universality and of cognition, as a system of …” → § 274 (on the relation between legislation and the living customs of a people)
    p. 471 (part 3, 1803) – “We remark in advance, in general, that philosophy, through the universality of the …” → § 3 (on the boundary between philosophical and positive (historical) legal science)

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